Zach Hughes - Deep Freeze

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Deep Freeze by Zach

Hughes

CHAPTER ONE

Dan Webster came into the control room wearing gym shorts. He had a

towel draped around his neck. Sweat gleamed on his chest and shoulders.

"Nice of you to decide to join me," his wife said. "Not that it's anything

of priority. Certainly not as important as your daily exercise."

Dan grinned. "I did detect a certain amount of urgency in your voice,

Mama."

"Don't call me Mama," she said. "I am not your mother."

"Thank God," he said. He came to stand behind her. "With this

machine it is impossible to get lost."

Fran Webster lifted her eyebrows and said, "Tell that to the machine."

"Let me take a look. Let's see what you've done wrong," Dan said, taking

Fran's place in the command chair and swiveling it toward the console of

the Century Series computer.

Fran said, "Hummmph."

Dan reached out to pat her on her soft rump. Touching her renewed his

awareness that at an age which represented almost three quarters of her

life expectancy—and his—she was still shapely and firm, but there would

be time for that. There was always plenty of time when two people alone

on a small ship set out to cover considerable distances across the

emptiness of space. At the moment it was of interest to find out why the

computer was confused.

He was a tall man, Dan Webster, a smiling man. Although in a certain

light his pale scalp gleamed on the back of his head he still had most of his

hair. The decades had been kind to him. Fran, almost as tall as he, had a

mature figure. She was an attractive woman. Her brown hair was just

beginning to lighten with gray. She pinched him playfully as she moved

aside to let him take the command chair.

"Now the thing to remember," Dan said, "is not to push any buttons

until you know exactly what buttons to push. As they taught us, you've got

to remember the proper buttonology." So saying, he pushed a button that

caused an explosion of telltale trouble lights on the display.

"I do like to learn from an expert," Fran said smugly.

Dan grinned widely. "Just giving you a demonstration of what not to

do."

He corrected his error and punched in the Navpro. As the old Century

Series computer began to muck around in its Verbolt Cloud memory

chambers it made a sound so much like a labored grunt that Dan pulled

back, startled. Star maps began to flash on and off the display with

dizzying speed.

"Come on now," Dan said, pressing buttons soothingly. The computer's

frantic searchings slowed, but the star fields on the display bore no

resemblance to the dots and blazes of light visible on the optic viewscreen

over Dan's head.

"I told you," Fran said. "I said, Papa, if we're going to go jumping off

into unexplored space on a little ship not much bigger than my dressing

room at home, I think we'd better have a new computer."

"Yes, Mama, that's what you said," Dan sighed, as he spoke comforting

things to the computer through his fingertips.

"Staying close to home wasn't adventurous enough for Mr. Daniel

Webster. No, sir. Taking a nice vacation on Terra II or one of the nice new

wilderness worlds wasn't for him. He had to go where no one else had

gone. He had to spend all sorts of money on—what?" She paused. Actually,

there was no venom in her comments. They had been together for seventy

years. She had borne him two sons and three daughters, all of them doing

quite well, thank you, and she'd been just as eager as he to have one last

little adventure before settling down into that final quarter of man's

allocated six-score years.

"I spent a considerable sum of money on the Rimfire charts," Dan said

patiently. "But not, as a certain person has hinted, enough to cause us to

spend our last years in privation."

Fran looked upward. "He spent it on charts that show nothing but exit

and entry points into completely unexplored segments of the galaxy," Fran

said to the ship, to the humming little mechanisms, to the purring power

of the blink generator, and to the expanse of unknown stars that glittered

like hard diamonds on the black background of nothingness.

"Ah," Dan said, caressing a button that changed the search mode of the

computer. "Look here, Mama. Somehow or other you hit this white

button. See?"

"I see."

"And when you hit it you started the computer working on charts for

the other side of the galaxy."

"Mummmmph," Fran said.

"The computers couldn't locate us because it was looking for us on the

wrong charts."

The Rimfire charts were so voluminous that they had been clouded in

sectors. Rimfire, in her time the most advanced ship in the fleet of the

Department of Exploration and Alien Search, had circumnavigated the

galaxy, making short excursions into promising looking areas along the

periphery. She had marked her trail carefully with blink beacons. With her

charts it was possible for a ship, even a small, antiquated Mule like Dan

and Fran's Old Folks, to blink all the way around the disc of the Milky Way

in a few hundred settings of the generator.

At first it had been a bit spooky making the long, long jumps outside

the disc of the galaxy. Even a gentleman amateur space traveler like Dan

Webster knew the fundamental rules governing the use of a blink

generator. Rule number one: Never blink into the unknown. Odd things

happen when a ship traveling in that never-never land that is outside of

but concurrent with space and time comes into contact with an object of

mass. Certain alterations in molecular bondings merge the two masses.

Everyone who had ever read anything about space travel had seen the

pictures of the two known incidents of a blinking ship fusing with another

body. In sculptured detail the sleek prow of a small X&A cruiser protruded

from the iron-black, metallic mass of an asteroid. In even more dramatic

pictures the colonizer ship Vulpecula Columbus was shown blended with a

smaller merchantman. Bonding with a chunk of rock, an iron asteroid, or

any sizable body contacted in non-space was a terminal process for human

life.

Unless X&A had laid down blink beacons one never blinked beyond the

range of the ship's eyes. So, at first, making those megaleaps out there in

the blackness of intergalactic space had been spooky, with Old Folks

reluctant to leave the frail security of a blink beacon from which the view

of the galaxy was more than spectacular. Off on the port quarter could be

seen the galaxy's hot heart bulging in a globular mass from the slightly

tilted plane of the disc. Later, as Dan grew more accustomed to blinks

measured in parsecs, he was tempted to follow Rimfire's trail all the way

around the galaxy.

"Be something, Mama, to say we've made it all the way. Not many can

say that."

"I can think of other things I'd rather say," Fran said.

Old Folks was out there in the big dark because Dan Webster wasn't

ready to don house slippers and become an old man. He had worked

sixty-five years with United Tigian Shipping, a firm that sent ships

blinking out to every inhabited world in the United Planets sector. He had

started with the company as a trainee bookkeeper and had retired a vice

president with a desire to do something other than take up a hobby and

wait for his personal support system to begin to malfunction. To his

surprise and pleasure, it was Fran who suggested, "Papa, why don't we do

some traveling?"

The ship had made a ninety-degree arc around the periphery from its

point of exit opposite Tigian II. Back there on the "world" the Webster

home was sealed against intruders, climate conditioned against damp or

dry or mildew or gnawing insects. It could be opened only by a voice

command from Dan or, in the event of necessity, an override of the

security system directed by the eldest Webster son.

They had spent two months on Xanthos, the U.P. administration

planet, fighting government red tape to get the final permits on the

reconditioned space tug, and then they had done some simple blinking,

following well established routes toward the periphery. And now Old Folks

was a long way from home and had made a shallow penetration into an

area of thinly placed stars. She rested within visual range of the blink

beacon that marked Rimfire's deepest excursion into the disc at that

point.

"Well, Mama," Dan said, after the computer had located them

precisely, showing Old Folks as a blinking dot amid a field of scattered

stars, "where do we go from here?"

Fran shrugged.

"You've always been the lucky one," Dan said. "Pick us a winner."

"There," Fran whispered, as if in doubt. She pointed out a grouping of

stars a few parsecs toward galactic center.

"There it shall be," Dan said.

They didn't even have names, that grouping of seven stars toward

which Old Folks made her slow way. Masses of stars and interstellar

matter blocked them from the telescopes on the U.P. worlds. They showed

on the new Rimfire charts, but there had been no attempt by Captain

Julie Roberts or her scientific team to name the millions of stars recorded

by the ship's instruments.

Dan didn't know the procedures for naming new stars, and he didn't

give it too much thought beyond an idle speculation that it would be nice

to name a real pretty one for Fran. He was too busy using the ship's

sensors and detectors to make sure that the next short blink didn't put Old

Folks into the nuclear furnace of a sun or merge her with a hard, cold

asteroid.

The real work began when the ship left Rimfire's well marked trail. The

blink generator aboard Old Folks had traveled not a few parsecs, for sure,

but it was solid and dependable and it was powerful, for the ship was a

space tug, built to take vessels a thousand times her mass into her

electronic embrace and blink them safely to the nearest shipyard. The

generator was capable of multiple short blinks without recharging, but

even so, she spent long hours drifting in the big empty while the generator

reached out to the odd mixture of magnetic and radioactive energy

emanating from the nearest star.

Since there was no real hurry, they didn't work in shifts. When it was

bedtime in the Western Standard Zone on Tigian II, they put the ship's

systems on auto and went to sleep. Dan Webster had always looked on

bedtime as one of the highlights of his day, for it meant cuddling up to the

sleek softness of the woman who had carried his children. Bedtime,

depending on Fran's hormonal state, could be a sweet, touching, drowsy

sinking into sleep or a mutually satisfying if ritualized romp which ended

with Fran making little moaning sounds and Dan laughing like a fool. He

always laughed because it was so very good. After so many years they read

each other's little signals, responded eagerly, and proved with surprising

regularity that youth had no monopoly on the pleasures of the flesh.

Old Folks was provisioned for a voyage of three years, with emergency

space rations for another half year. The Century 4000 held the largest

collection of books and films available from the Library of the

Confederation on Xanthos. Dan was in no hurry at all. He let the ship's

detection systems minutely search the space around a near star and

logged the results carefully into the computer's avid maw. It made him feel

good. He hadn't discovered anything, not yet, but he was the first man to

record that a particular star at a particular coordinate in space had no

spawn, that nothing orbited the nuclear furnace but a band of diffuse

gases and some almost undetectable floes of space dust.

Fran had attended a good school on Tigian II. Her degree was in the

field of literature. She had always felt a bit guilty as she reared her family

and made a home for them for not having continued her school days

delving into the "better" books produced by the writers of the hundreds of

worlds that made up the United Planets Confederation. She had promised

herself that she'd use the time in space to catch up on her reading, but so

far, she had not made it through one book. The stilted language didn't

ring well in her ears. The concerns of the writers of a thousand years in the

past seemed, in the light of real life, to be inconsequential. Now, as Old

Folks blinked in short jumps toward a G-class star a few light-years away

from the first sun examined by the ship's sensors, she decided that she

would do a paper for publication by her discussion group on the works

and career of a particular holofilm director. This gave her an excuse to

watch her very favorite films over and over, eased the irritation of having

to make selections from the almost too complete collection in the

computer chambers, and drove Dan to catch up on his exercise in the

ship's gym.

When Dan called his wife away from her fourth viewing of her favorite

of all favorite films she saw immediately that he was excited.

"Look, Frannie," he said, pointing to the screen.

"Oh, my," Fran said.

By optical tricks the ship's eyes showed a little yellow star and its family

of no less than six planets. By compressing the distances between the

orbiting bodies the optics made the grouping look like a model solar

system in a classroom.

"Oh, my, Daniel," Fran said.

"I have to confess, Frannie, that I didn't have too much confidence that

we'd actually find something," Dan said.

She bent quickly and kissed him. "Dan Webster, you've always

accomplished everything you set out to do."

"Then I guess I set my aim too low, huh, Mama?"

"You hush. And don't call me Mama."

"Well, there they are. Like a hen and her chicks." He chuckled. "Which

one shall we name Frannie's World?"

"That would be a silly name for a planet."

"Not in my opinion," he said. He turned to the console. "Let's take a

closer look."

Two of the outer planets were dark and ice-shrouded, far from the

life-giving warmth of the sun, circling the distant source like unwanted

orphans. The next two, as they were enlarged on the viewer, proved to be

gas giants. The first planet was too near the solar furnace and was nothing

more than scorched rock. Dan had purposely saved the second planet for

last viewing, because some quick measurements by the sensors had shown

the world to lie in what the computer calculated to be the little yellow

sun's life zone.

Dan held his breath. He pushed buttons. The Century 4000 grunted

and moaned a bit and then the image of a world began to form on the

screen. Dan wanted to see the blue of a water world so badly that for a few

moments the slowly turning world took on a pale hue of that most

wonderful of colors. He ordered the computer to check focus. He shielded

his eyes as brilliant reflected sunlight gleamed on the screen before the

optics could make a corrective adjustment.

Fran's World, the second planet of a G-class star, was a spheroid of

glimmering ice. There was water on the world, but it was locked into a

mass of snow and ice that covered the surface almost evenly. Dan was so

disappointed that he turned off the viewer and punched up a drink.

Fran came to stand beside him, pressing her soft flank against him.

"There are the mining rights," she said.

"Yes, we can file for discoverer's royalty on any useful minerals," Dan

said.

"Papa, how many stars have we examined?"

"Two."

"Don't you remember what we read? People who make a profession of

exploration can go for decades without finding a star that has planets."

"Thank you," Dan said, patting her. "You always know what I'm

thinking, don't you?"

She laughed. "Well, if I don't know you by now—"

"Some useful heavy metals may have boiled to the surface on the first

planet," Dan said.

"We haven't checked for moons around the gas giants, either."

"You're right. Let's have a look."

It took some sublight maneuvering to examine the several moons of the

large planets. A couple of them looked promising. Dan named five of them

after his children, and applied the names of some of the grandchildren to

the others. Deciding which moon to name after which child was a fun

thing. The investigations of the moons filled a couple of months. They

went about it in a leisurely fashion, taking time to get a full night's sleep,

time to watch a film together, time to snuggle close in their large bed and

do interesting things.

Old Folks edged cautiously into the solar storm of particles to come

near enough to the one planet to record some encouraging readings of

heavy metals, then got the hell out of there quickly, for the ship's radiation

detectors were getting a bit worried. Dan parked the ship in an orbit

around the second planet while he readied his claims for filing. Old Folks

would have to blink back within range of the first Rimfire beacon before

the announcement of discovery and the proper forms could be blinked

back down the long line of beacons to X&A Headquarters on Xanthos. The

temporary beacons left behind by Old Folks to guide them back to the

beaten path could not handle blink messages.

With everything in readiness, Dan took one last look at the second

planet. He set the computer to work confirming her distance from her sun

and the strength of the star's radiations. He was not an astrophysicist, but

he had a gut feeling that something was wrong with the figures. The

second planet was roughly the same size as Tigian II. She was at an

optimum distance from her sun. There were no dark and brooding clouds

to shield her from the sun's life-giving emanations. When the computer

confirmed once more that by all rights the water that was locked up in the

vast fields of ice should have been liquid, Dan took Old Folks down toward

the glittering surface for a closer look.

Fran watched nervously as the squarish Mule lowered until she was

moving over the surface at a rate of speed that made her motion quite

apparent. In open space one never realized that the ship was moving so

fast.

"What are you doing, Papa?" she asked nervously.

"Just having a look."

He had all of the ship's sensors at work. A long, rounded ridge of ice

was a range of impressive mountains. Lower, flatter areas made Dan

wonder if once there had been oceans on Fran's World. He let the little

ship zip around the planet in an orbit that eventually covered all of the

surface. There were no spectacular readings, nothing to cause the systems

to shout "Eureka!" with buzzers and flashing lights, but when Dan studied

the readings after moving the ship into a higher, stable orbit he whistled.

"Have a look at this, Mama," he said.

"I see it," Fran said. "But what is it?" She was unable to make anything

of the charted readings.

"Metals," Dan said. "Concentrations of them here and here." He

pointed to two spots on the featureless globe. "Other places, too. This

might be quite something, Mama. How'd you like to be very, very rich?"

"I would rather have been very, very rich when we were young," she said

with a smile.

"But you wouldn't object to being rich now, I take it."

"Not too much."

Dan began to give the computer orders.

"You're not going down?" Fran asked in alarm.

"It's all right."

"There's nothing there but ice."

"Mama, it's colder in space than it will be on the surface. There's some

solar heating."

"Why must we go down?"

"Because we want to be rich," he said. "Because I need better readings

of those metal sources. I can get them by driving a heat probe through the

ice."

Fran was still doubtful. She watched nervously as Old Folks lowered

into a hint of atmosphere and then landed on the gleaming, icy surface.

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ScannedbyHighroller.Proofedbythebestelfproofer.MadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.DeepFreezebyZachHughesCHAPTERONEDanWebstercameintothecontrolroomwearinggymshorts.Hehadatoweldrapedaroundhisneck.Sweatgleamedonhischestandshoulders."Niceofyoutodecidetojoinme,"hiswifesaid."Notthatit'sanything...

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Zach Hughes - Deep Freeze

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